Consumer electronics is a bad metric for measuring the passage of time. And, frankly, consumer electronics shows are way worse. I have attended CES in a double-digit number, and for the most part experienced it similarly: as a week-long flood of news and shiny gadgets, the news from trailers, press centers, hotel rooms and hallways of convention centers in a sometimes quixotic attempt to define the trends of the year.
The halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center and its many satellite expo halls and hotel suites are full of ghosts of good intentions and forced obsolescence. That is in the nature of the category. Some of the devices that have become our daily drivers over the past decade were showcased at CES, but mostly devices come and go – if they ever make it onto the shelves.
CES 2022 is going to be strange – a fact that has more to do with extenuating global circumstances than anything that happens on the exhibition floor (although, last time I heard, one of the Backstreet Boys will still be there to showcase home boxing equipment). Questions about the relevance of personal conferences before COVID-19, of course – although the CES always felt like an exception, as it was important to be in the same room with the announced hardware.
After just missing out on pandemic shutdowns in 2020, CES 2021 was a test run to see what a purely virtual future might look like. The results were … undercooked. At CES 2012, however, there were none of these problems. After a slight decline in previous years (due to a global recession), the show recorded the best attendance ever with 153,000 visitors. The growth would continue for the next several years as the event continued to take over Vegas and peaked again at around 182,000 in 2019, according to the CTA.
In 2012, CES still felt like a phone show that no longer exists. Between the following month’s Mobile World Congress and the decision by many large companies to follow in Apple’s footsteps by announcing their flagships at will, CES is no longer the same epicenter of phone news as it used to be. Although that void was quickly filled by other categories over the next decade – most notably the automotive industry, which has moved to the top.
Color-coded cables run into the radio unit of Sprint Corp.’s 8T8R equipment, the multiple antenna technology that combines 8 transmit and 8 receive radios in one cellular site to power the LTE-TDD 2.5 GHz spectrum of Sprint on a roof in. Chicago, Illinois, USA on Wednesday August 13, 2014. Sprint reported its first quarterly profit in more than six years in July, with sales beating analysts’ estimates after it had more subscribers than forecast. Photographer: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg via Getty Images.
LTE was everywhere CES 2012, similar to the 5G bombing a few years ago. CNET even went so far as to cheekily call the show a “4G orgy” in a headline. Five years after Sprint paraded Wimax in Vegas for the show, it was officially ready to get off the ship and join the rest of the world in LTE country. the Sony Xperia S Made headlines as well as that Droid 4, Motorola’s valiant attempt to keep the physical keyboard alive five years after the first iPhone marked the beginning of the end of the BlackBerry’s reign.
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But the show really was one of two LTE-enabled Windows Phone devices announced at the show. the HTC Titan II was perhaps the first device in the operating system to feature next-generation wireless technology, but the Nokia Lumia 900 captivated the imagination of the participants with a 4.3-inch AMOLED display, an 8-megapixel rear camera, 512 MB RAM and a striking design.
A year earlier, Stephen Elop openly CEO compared the company’s ailments to a man standing on a burning platform in the middle of the icy water. The partnership with Microsoft was Nokia’s leap. A year later, Nokia sold its wireless communications division to Microsoft.
Like the Droid 4’s valiant attempt – when it is ultimately doomed – to hang on to the QWERTY keyboard, Sony’s bloggie was a last breath for standalone blogging camcorders. That was a year after Cisco closed its flip video business after acquiring the then-brand new pocket camcorder for $ 590 million in 2009. Let Sony say “screw it” and try to squeeze the last few embers out of a dying category.
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And then there were the ultrabooks. If you can tell the category had a moment, it was those five days in Las Vegas. By the middle of the year, the death stories of the category had already started. The category coined by Intel and announced at Computex 2011 was the latest thin-and-light classification – really an attempt for PC manufacturers to offer their own version of the MacBook Air.
Intel offered strict guidelines for the category, focusing on things like thinness, weight, and battery life. The category ended up being too expensive and doomed to fail with ever-changing spec target posts and the rise of smartphones and tablets.
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At CES 2012, desktop 3D printing was the future, and MakerBot was front and center. The NYC-based spinout of the open source RepRap project used the show to introduce the replicator. A significant improvement over its previous Thing-O-Matic system, the system had a Star Trek-inspired name and felt like a huge step towards a dream of having a 3D printer in every home.
Prices, technical constraints, and the introduction of more advanced technology from companies like Formlabs dampened the fate of many companies in the industry, which ultimately turned out to be a pretty massive tech hype bubble. A year later, MakerBot was acquired by 3D printing giant Stratasys, which focused on technology for the education market.
As always, CES brings a lot of concepts that are meant to stay conceptual. The Samsung Smart Window is pretty much on par in this regard. The transparent window display with touchscreen functionality drew the attention of many trade fair visitors at a time when everyone wanted everything on a giant screen, but never got far beyond the CES booth decoration. As a footnote, the company has since invested in an artificial smart window as part of his C-Lab initiativebecause the consumer electronics industry is strangely cyclical, despite their talk about future advances.
Ten years later, CES 2012 seems more of a failure than a hit. Certainly the most hyped products are the ones that suffer the most in hindsight. We never made it to 3D printers and smart windows in every home, but hey, LTE has had a pretty good run.
